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VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

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Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#251

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

Those are all great ideas for a user-friendly ad network. I think that you could add "so the user makes fewer network requests and loads the page faster" as a reason for the option to download a resource pack.

But the key requirement for an ad network is that it makes money. I am optimistic that your system would produce user-friendly sites that would, given good content, eventually develop a positive reputation, earn more traffic, and make more money than their competitors. But that requires long-term vision and user-first business ethics, which most companies are not very good at. At any time, once that reputation and traffic pattern was established, switching to a more aggressive ad network would make the site or ad seller more money. Then it would dip back down as users reacted, but I am not convinced that a sufficient number of businesses would have the wherewithal to see it through.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#252
post #158

This whole thing would actually be technically quite easy to solve: just introduce new attribute to iframe, say f.ex. you could have traffic-limit="10MB", and request-limit="5". Browser would block the iframe and anything that runs in it cold, if it exceeds limits. In an ad-auction one would sell the ad space with the knowledge of those limits. Publisher would have perfect control on how heavy ads they allow on their…

Wouldn't it be easy to just... var iframe = document.createElement('iframe'); iframe.src = '(ad url here)'; document.body.appendChild(iframe); For every new ad?

Yup it would be, and as someone working in the ad tech industry it's most definitely what would happen.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great to me. People only publishing what they want others to read, no clickbait, absolutely marvellous.

How do you expect journalists to pay their rent in this utopia?

By producing much better content and analysis then they currently do. The kind of content and analysis that someone is willing to sponsor or pay for or support through other ways. There's no shortage of bloggers, small outlets, and analysts who are doing just fine - no intrusive ads needed.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#254
post #55

> I'm at 53MB downloaded and 5559 requests. That was not advertisement, but malware. It is probably running DDos attack on some website. We should block that. Anyway, at ancient days I surfed with i486 on 14.4 kbps modem. Not much has changed since.

That's actually par for the course for most VPAID stuff out there, specially the infinite looping kind.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#255
post #52

Is this really such a hard problem for Google to solve or is it just turning a blind eye to it? Can't Google limit the size of the ads somehow? The number of requests per page? Whether the ad remains a static image or it's a video? I find it hard to believe it would be that hard for Google to implement restrictions around this. And advertisers wonder why the use of adblockers is skyrocketing. If Google knows about th…

Increasing Google's revenue every quarter is certainly enough of a challenge without a policy of discarding clients.

Don't expect any solution from them. This is something end users (by ad-blocking) or startups (by destroying the market) can do, but not big companies.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#256
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you were running the internet marketing agency and spending six figures on ads would your clients have been OK with the model you outlined above? Would you have steered their dollars there rather than to platforms that allow more rich media ads, more tracking/demographics, retargeting, and similar?

You've poked and prodded the parent commenter, but he has provided more discussion than you have. What is your issue with his suggestion? What are your qualifications to have issue with his suggestion?

They are genuine questions.

It seems to me that it's pointless to discuss product development without considering the customers of that product, so I'm trying to elicit discussion of that specific topic.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#257

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

Mind you, HTML5 allows for advertisers to do a lot of resource-hogging crap too, and not directly sandboxed like flash was / is.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#258

At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important. We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it. We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A fe…

I've spent months working on the video players for all the brands for one of the largest media companies in the world.

I did plenty unpleasant work for them, like building a clean redesign, agonizing over page load speeds, and then filling up the page with multi-megabyte tracking tools and every possible ad under sun (which would not only ruin the design, but often inexplicably and randomly break the page because of really, really shitty code).

All that work was pleasant compared to the horror of working on the video player though, and I felt bad for the full-timers who were usually put on 'bug-fixing' duty while we contractors got to work on the cool projects...

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#259

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

Those are all great ideas for a user-friendly ad network. I think that you could add "so the user makes fewer network requests and loads the page faster" as a reason for the option to download a resource pack. But the key requirement for an ad network is that it makes money. I am optimistic that your system would produce user-friendly sites that would, given good content, eventually develop a positive reputation, ear…

I don't know how lucrative and / or effective it is, but a lot of high quality websites united in using The DECK, an ad network without a lot of bells and whistles. Since it's been around for quite some time, I guess they're doing well.

The ad network I'm proposing will never be as large as Google is right now. If it's a small network that only connects entrepeneurs with solid long-term visions, I am fine with that. I don't believe in unicorns anyway.

*http://decknetwork.net/

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#260

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

> ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date So, while adserver waiting for an ad from the RTB waterfall, then your server would wait too. It's not best practice I guess. Besides that, many of your points already adopted by all ad networks. Many of the ad sector's problems directly related to adve…

> They want to measure everything, everything!

They can learn to live without spying on everything (this means no javascript), or they can learn to deal with more and more people installing an adblocker. Wanting something doesn't mean they get it.

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